Certainty and uncertainty in contemporary spirituality and Catholicism: Finding proof versus destabilizing certainties in popular religion in the Netherlands

Abstract

This article is based on several years of ethnographic research in the Netherlands on contemporary spirituality and Catholicism. The emphasis within the networks of contemporary spirituality discussed here is on finding ‘proof’ of ‘the other side’. This quest for certainty is compared to another religious context, dominated by a discourse of liberal Catholicism, where the emphasis is on learning to deal with uncertainty (previously discussed in this journal: see Knibbe, 2008). Here, uncertainty is experienced as liberating. This comparison is the basis for the development of a theoretical approach to understanding both the quest for certainty and the quest for uncertainty, based on Jackson’s essay ‘Minima ethnographica’ (1998). The article ends with a reflection on the implications of these findings in relation to the tendency within the sociology of religion to look for causal links between societal changes and changes in religion.

Introduction

Humans are often imagined to be on a continuous quest for certainty in the face of many obstacles: not just those presented by the natural world (storms, earthquakes, bad harvests) but also the many man-made calamities (Beck, 1999) that exist today: war, famine, economic crisis, climate change and exploding nuclear reactors. Furthermore, in today’s world, it is thought we are confronted by the more intangible risk of ontological insecurity: the grand narratives no longer seem plausible, and authority has become permanently unstable (e.g. Bauman, 1996, 1998). Religion is popularly seen as the site par excellence where people look for certainties and solutions, even where none seem possible. In the sociology of religion, religion is often interpreted as a reaction to social and cultural change: whether it is a fundamentalist type of religion, where certainty and authority are, at least ostensibly, located in ancient texts that provide a defence against modernity and globalization (e.g. Bruce, 2008), or a ‘subjectified’ religion, where truth is anchored in personal experiences of whatever is considered to be sacred (e.g. Heelas, 1996; Heelas and Woodhead, 2005; Hervieu-Léger, 1993; Knibbe and Versteeg, 2008). Both are interpreted as strategies for re-creating a basis of religious knowledge and authority and dealing with uncertainty.

This article compares two religious contexts in the south of the Netherlands that seem to have opposing ways of dealing with insecurity and uncertainty in relation to metaphysical questions. The south of the Netherlands is a region that is still predominantly Catholic, but it has undergone a rapid de-churching since the 1970s. The region in which the fieldwork took place is rural in character, and the research focused on the role of religion and spirituality in village life. Within the chosen villages, there were two spaces offering contrasting opportunities to delve into spiritual and religious matters: a ‘spiritual association’ and a pastoral centre with a liberal Catholic background.

In both contexts, people have had no more than a normal share of unsettling experiences to deal with in their life: maybe some have been out of a job, depressed or worried about their sick children or have even lost a child. Nevertheless, in the first context, that of a ‘spiritual association’ where people meet to train their paranormal powers and explore esoteric subjects, there is a very strong emphasis on certainty, on metaphysical truth – the kind of certainty that tells them their life has a meaning and a purpose, that there is a reason for everything that has happened to them and everything that is happening to them now.

In contrast, within the second context, that of a Catholic pastoral centre not more than three kilometres away, there was an emphasis on uncertainty as a source of meaning and a way of dealing with suffering. ¹ The discourse of this context could be labelled as ‘liberal Catholic’: the emphasis is on the impossibility of being sure of God’s existence; he can only be (partially) known through his son, Jesus, as a human being. In other publications, I concluded that it is possible to understand the quest for uncertainty against the background of the Catholic past of this region, where many people were raised within a framework that emphasized certainty and any kind of doubt was severely reprimanded. To emphasize uncertainty in religious matters was a liberating experience for them, and enabled them to re-imagine their relationships with religious authority (Knibbe, 2008, 2013a). How then can we understand the emphasis on certainty prevalent in the spiritual association? Are those people so very different from the ones frequenting the pastoral centre?

Within the sociology of religion, there is often the (implicit or explicit) assumption that religious developments can be understood as products of particular social processes. This assumption was most explicit in the many varieties of the secularization thesis. More recent attempts to redefine the field have similarly suggested that present-day religion can be understood as a response to stresses produced by social processes and structures. The emphasis on certainty, proof or firm ontological ground under one’s feet seems to tie in with sociological interpretations of the conditions of (post)modernity as creating new uncertainties and ‘ontological insecurities’ (Bauman, 1996, 1998; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) and might lead to ‘reactionary’ types of religion such as fundamentalism (Bruce, 2008). At the same time, others have argued that within Christianity and certain forms of spirituality, a ‘second naivety’ or ‘post-critical’ mode of believing emerges, emphasizing contingency and uncertainty (Fontaine et al., 2002; Hutsebaut, 2003).

In contrast, following in the footsteps of Weber and Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 2003; Weber et al., 1946), this article departs from the belief that social processes and structures cannot be understood without taking into account the cultural/religious understandings of these processes of actors in society. In other words, we cannot study religion as a response to or outcome of a particular social process without first investigating how people themselves perceive their own situation vis-a-vis that process. The link between social change and religious change is always mediated by the interpretative work of people themselves, building on existing interpretations, and these interpretations may themselves be causes of social changes in the wider society. Furthermore, this article will show that the idea that religion is associated with a search for certainty while spirituality implies a destabilizing or relativizing of certainty can be turned on its head.

Below, I will first describe the context of the spiritual association and the ways in which people look for certainty and proof. I will then compare this to the uncertainty emphasized in the pastoral centre. This will only be described briefly, summarizing the argument made in the previous publication (Knibbe, 2008). I will end with a discussion of how it is possible that both certainty and uncertainty can be desirable.

Spirituality: emphasizing certainty and proof

From 1999 to 2002 I carried out fieldwork in several contexts dominated by mediums, psychics and magnetists (Knibbe and Westra, 2003; Knibbe, 2012, 2013a, 2013b; Knibbe et al., 2012). The first study was carried out in 1999 and early 2000, together with a fellow student, among visitors to the Dutch medium Jomanda. During her mass healing services, she claimed to enable doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and other medical personnel from ‘the other side’ to treat people. Then, from 2001 until 2002, I carried out research with a ‘spiritual association’ in the south of the Netherlands. It turned out that the Netherlands, and particularly the south, is dotted with this type of association, often centring on a medium or psychic, where people gather to develop their paranormal skills and pursue an interest in spirituality. Before she became nationally famous, Jomanda was regularly invited to give séances and healings during the meetings of these associations.

The association where I did participant observation had both ‘closed nights’, for members only, and ‘open nights’. On closed nights, the members practised their own paranormal powers and discussed esoteric subjects in depth. On open nights, everybody was welcome to attend a lecture, séance or healing. The people leading the open nights were usually members of other spiritual associations in the area; sometimes someone from another province was invited to give a lecture, healing or séance. On closed nights, members trained each other in skills such as aura-reading and tarot card-reading. I attended both open and closed evenings. Below, I will use the abbreviation SG (Spiritual Group) to refer to this particular association.

There was a group of about thirty regular members – people who attended because they were interested in developing their own paranormal or healing powers. Many members were mediums and psychics who had their own practice. They attended meetings for personal reasons (e.g. to learn from a more experienced medium or get a message) or to teach (on closed nights). Especially when there was a séance or a ‘reading’ (of auras, handprints, candle wax drawings or other objects that were assumed to be charged with energies of events and people), many new faces appeared, swelling the audience: people who had just lost somebody and hoped to get a message, people who were in a personal crisis or concerned about somebody close to them, and a few who seemed to be in ‘perpetual’ crisis. These séances and readings also drew the curious, who hoped to find the evidence they needed to believe the claims of the mediums and psychics about the existence of ‘the other side’.

Although the eclecticism of the practices and techniques on which people draw, especially within the spiritual associations, is very similar to what is described as New Age in the literature, there are important differences. In Hanegraaff’s classification, the beliefs and practices within these contexts should be seen as an extreme form of occultism known as spiritualism (Hanegraaff, 1996). One can argue whether it is useful to cling to such categorizations (Stuckrad, 2010). Nevertheless, it is clear that there are similarities in both ideas and practices with historical forms of spiritualism, even though practitioners themselves do not explicitly place themselves within a historical lineage (see Bender, 2010).

In present-day characterizations of New Age, the impression dominates that these beliefs are becoming more and more abstract and psychologized. In his inaugural lecture, Hanegraaff even signalled the ‘end of the hermetic tradition’ (Hanegraaff, 1999). Ramstedt also shows that in modern paganism, it is often hard to distinguish between literal ‘invocation’ and the metaphorical play of symbols that characterizes fantasy, and that people often do not really care to distinguish between the two (Ramstedt, 2007).

In contrast, in the SG and the networks and activities within which it was embedded, it was clear that a literal interpretation of cosmologies and all the beings that are associated with these cosmologies dominates, and that members and visitors were eager to resolve the question of the actual existence of spirits, ‘the other side’ and paranormal phenomena in general. The emphasis is on ‘evidence’, which was assumed to somehow automatically translate into guidelines for a meaningful life. One could characterize the default attitude of many of the visitors as sceptical positivist (Knibbe, 2013a: 139–140).

At the same time, most people who frequented the evening functions of the SG shared a very practical attitude: a particular practice either works or does not work; it gives you more insight or it does not. And if it does not, you continue looking until you find something that works (see Fedele, this volume). Even those for whom the existence of ‘the other side’ was an uncontroversial fact retained a critical attitude: does this medium really communicate with ‘the other side’? And even if (s)he is not making it up, is (s)he not too ‘subjective’ in her/his transmission?

Practitioners took it for granted that the visitors on the open nights, and their ‘clients’ on the paranormal markets or in their private practice, would be sceptical. They accepted that they had something to prove and often talked among themselves about strategies for convincing sceptics. At the same time, there was an understanding that sceptics knew ‘in their heart’ that what they were saying was true, that resistance to metaphysical truth might be due to a blocked chakra, cutting them off from awareness of a greater reality. Epistemology includes embodied experience and changes in consciousness as sites for ‘fact-finding’. This meant that one could only ‘know’ certain things as facts after embodying a certain level of ‘spiritual’ development. Ultimately, it was thought, the existence of ‘the other side’, intelligences, angels, levels of spiritual development, etc., were a matter of energy frequencies that could all be measured. Metaphysics were considered to be only the frontline of physics.

This literalism became particularly clear during one evening, when a visiting expert gave a lecture on pyramids. He spent most of the time explaining the kind of research that had been done on these pyramids and the myths that surrounded them, but he emphasized that from a scientific point of view the puzzle of how they were built was still unsolved and one could not know whether these myths were true. He refused to commit himself to any (natural or supernatural) explanation of how the pyramids were built, leaving the question open.

This made the audience restless; they wanted certainty. All the questions put to him focused on this issue: What did he ‘really’ think? Were the pyramids built by extra-terrestrials, by slave labour or by the people of Atlantis? And were the people of Atlantis ‘actually’ the same extra-terrestrials who might have built the pyramids? And didn’t all the evidence point to the fact that these pyramids couldn’t have been built without some kind of supernatural powers? Hadn’t he said himself that people use only a fraction of their brainpower? Didn’t this imply that ancient people might have had other kinds of powers – powers that we could learn to use?

When the speaker still did not want to commit himself to any certainties, people started supplying each other with information, giving references to books and talking about instruments that could ‘measure’ the energy frequencies of the pyramids and of the objects within them and how these corresponded to the frequencies of significant numbers and measurements. On this subject, the lecturer was prepared to be more authoritative, because he had a business selling pyramid frames, which could be used for ‘charging’ objects, food and water for beneficial health effects. He also recommended sleeping under a pyramid. According to him, someone had actually patented the concept of using a pyramid to keep razorblades sharp. However, he still maintained that, ‘scientifically’, people had no idea how this worked. To the people in the audience, this caveat seemed irrelevant: they knew that machines and tools for measuring frequencies were sold at paranormal markets, and were convinced that such machines could scientifically measure the frequencies of pyramids and explain their miraculous powers, providing ‘factual knowledge’ on the relative spiritual frequencies of other objects and people. The speaker’s caveat was not allowed to stand. He had to choose a side: either it was true or it was not true. Later, when I visited a tarot reader, she reminded me that we had met at the lecture of ‘that stupid man’ who was supposed to talk about pyramids but actually did not know anything about them. In other words, by refusing to provide ‘facts’ that could be confirmed by ‘regular science’, he had gone against the rules for creating knowledge and certainty in these contexts.

Although people who visit psychics, healers, mediums or magnetists are often depicted as gullible, weak-minded or desperate, they approach things with scepticism. Scepticism is expected; relativism and uncertainty are rejected. One could argue that they share more with their fiercest opponents than one might think: a commitment to positivism, to ‘proof’. People want to be convinced, and expect to be presented with proof.

Liberal Catholicism: emphasizing uncertainty

As mentioned in the introduction, sociological theories often see religion as a barrier against or a response to the uncertainties of this world. Similarly, in anthropological studies of religion in other parts of the world, religion is seen as a response to impersonal social processes such as the globalization of capitalism (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999, 2000). It is not hard to understand the quest for certainty described above as a response to the eternal uncertainties of life, even without taking into account the particularities of our present-day society: if there is indeed another side, if there is indeed a blueprint for our lives, if we indeed still need to develop the other 90% of our brains, then the possibilities are endless: it is all going somewhere; suffering is not meaningless but part of a plan for our lives and the lessons we need to learn. The assumption from which practitioners in the SG depart is that the physical world and our relationships with people are meaningfully connected in some way; we just need to figure out what the meaning is.

However, in the pastoral centre not three kilometres away from where the SG met, the aim of the pastors was to teach people to stop looking for certainty (Knibbe, 2008, 2013a). Trying to put their approach in a nutshell, they told people not to read the Bible like a newspaper, as a factual account of ‘what happened’, but to search for the underlying message of the story. Although the suggestion that they should learn to interpret the Bible themselves sometimes met with resistance (some people thought themselves unable to understand the Bible at all, as they had never been taught to do this in their Catholic upbringing), most participants experienced learning to interpret Bible texts by themselves as liberating.

The approach promoted by these pastors worked on the complicated relationship that many of the participants have with Catholicism. The south of the Netherlands was, and still is, predominantly Catholic. Its inhabitants had been brought up during a time when the Catholic pillar in the Netherlands was organized very efficiently. Pillars organized along religious or ideological lines are a typically Dutch, and to some extent Belgian, phenomenon and have been defined as ‘a network of different organizations, covering different domains of life, such as politics, unions, recreation, health care, schooling and religion that shape the corresponding sub culture and give it its identity’ (Hellemans, 1988: 43). This meant that people within these pillars lived their lives as much as possible away from the influence from other denominations and ideologies.

After the Second World War, many Catholic organizations renewed and redoubled their efforts to safeguard their flock against the dangers of modernization, communism, socialism, Malthusianism (birth control) and the general loosening of morals advocated by the music, films and other carriers of popular culture that were emanating from America. The Catholic elites strove to create organizations and safety nets so that people could be ‘Catholic in everything’. Access to certain books was restricted, and most schools in the south were run by Catholic nuns or friars.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Catholicism in the Netherlands was strongly influenced by liberal attitudes. Indeed, Dutch Catholics were cited worldwide as being at the forefront of the renewal efforts sparked by Vatican II. Key words were democratization, lay participation and liturgical renewal. The Church was re-conceptualized as an inclusive movement of God’s people that was still under way (‘God’s Volk onderweg’), implying that no one had yet arrived at the final answers. The celibacy of priests was a prominent item on the agenda for discussion, as was the prohibition of birth control. In the Netherlands, until the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae (Paul VI, 1968), it was understood that the ban on birth control would be lifted, and people expected their archbishop to go to Rome to tell the pope that it was time to cancel the obligation of celibacy for priests (Knibbe, 2013a: chapter 2). In line with the renewal initiated by Vaticanum II, Dutch Catholics felt that they, as the local branch of the Church, could decide on how to run their affairs.

This seems to have provoked a conservative backlash from Rome, initiated by several controversial appointments of bishops. In 1972, Rome overruled the local list of candidates and appointed a very conservative (and young) bishop in Limburg. Since this appointment, the Church – not only in Limburg, but also in the rest of the Netherlands – has become hopelessly polarized between those who support the liberal reforms initiated before 1972 and the ‘neo-conservative’ priests and bishops who were appointed after 1972. Liberal Catholics were marginalized within the hierarchy of the Church, forced to leave the priesthood or simply not given jobs. At the local level, this polarization sometimes caused fierce conflicts in communities, where young neo-conservative priests alienated people by (1) curtailing lay participation and implementing a hierarchical leadership style that signalled a departure from the more democratic leadership that had been developed by their liberal predecessors, and (2) badmouthing teachers of the local Catholic schools, claiming that they were not proper Catholics (Knibbe, 2013a: 3).

At the level of village and parish life, both the renewal and the subsequent conservative turn were seen as something that had come from ‘above’. This contradicts the representation of liberal Catholics and many historians of Catholicism in the Netherlands, who describe the liberalization and democratization of Catholicism in the Netherlands as an inevitable change, a reaction against the too hierarchical and strict Catholic subculture that had been developed through pillarization. However, as my informants of the pre-war generation and immediate post-Second World War generation said, it did not occur to them to question the constraints of this world, the obligation to attend mass, to confess, to learn the Catechism and to be obedient to one’s elders. Rather, it came as a shock when their children came home from school in the late 1960s and early 1970s saying that the priest had told them that if they did not want to go to church, they were free to stay away. Similarly, they had to get used to priests dressing informally and participating in village feasts, having girlfriends and in many cases leaving the priesthood. To them, it seemed that all the effort they had made to live according to the morals prescribed by the Church were being ridiculed. However, in time, they came to appreciate the more democratic leadership style developed by the liberal priests, the ways in which lay contributions to the liturgy were encouraged and appreciated, and the lively and warmhearted community life that was fostered in this way (Knibbe, 2013a: chapters 3–4).

After the liberalization within Catholicism, which also took place at the level of parishes in the Catholic south, the neo-conservative turn was generally perceived as an impossible attempt by the Church to ‘turn back the clock’ (Knibbe, 2013a: chapters 3–4). The result was that local parish churches where neo-conservative priests had been installed came to function apart from community life. In other parishes, the church was still more organically part of community life. The people who followed courses at the pastoral centre had all experienced some version of the history of liberalization and polarization described above, and they were used to thinking of themselves as Catholics, but they felt unsure of what exactly this meant. Or rather, they knew that this implied certain, mostly ritual, practices, but were less clear about what they should actually believe and why these ritual practices were important. To them, they were mostly important as a way of perpetuating local life: they had been baptized in the parish church, so they wanted their children also to be baptized there.

At the centre they were taught to read the Bible by themselves, to make decisions on how to shape the liturgy on the basis of their own understanding of Bible texts, and to communicate this understanding. Although many found this challenging, it also opened up new ways of relating to religious knowledge and religious authority for them. The traditional critical way of reading the Bible, which they were taught at the centre, emphasized uncertainty rather than certainty: the gospels were all written after Jesus’s death, and most were not eye-witness accounts. Furthermore, they should be read metaphorically, not literally, and then made relevant to the present time. The Bible should not be read as a factual account, but as an account of people’s experiences with God, with Jesus, with the uncertainty of ‘really’ knowing anything about God. Although both the people frequenting the SG and those attending the Bible study groups were inclined to ask questions and look for factual answers, the courses at the pastoral centre taught people to ask different sorts of questions: not ‘what happened?’, but ‘what does this story mean?’.

Rather than emphasizing certainty, the pastors emphasized uncertainty and the need to be grown-up about this. Looking for factual answers regarding religion was presented as a lack of psychological maturity. Similarly, they taught people not to let their faith depend on whether God would grant their requests: prayer may not change the situation, but it changes the person in the situation. Knowledge of God and all matters of faith were thus placed in the domain of uncertainty. People found this difficult, but also liberating. Through identifying with this style of reading the Bible and refusing to look for certainties when it came to religious knowledge, they contrasted themselves not only with fundamentalist Islamists, but also with Rome-centred Catholicism, which took the pope’s word to be infallible (Knibbe, 2008).

Discussion: Certainty versus uncertainty

From a commonsense perspective, people’s need for certainty does not seem to require explanation, while an emphasis on uncertainty does seem counter-intuitive. Yet both could be approached from the same perspective if we start from one of the insights formulated by the anthropologist Michael Jackson (1998: 119) in his ‘Minima ethnographica’:

[I]n every human society concepts such as fate, history, evolution, God, chance, and even the weather signify forces of otherness that one cannot fully fathom and over which one can expect to exercise little or no ultimate control. These forces are given; they are in the nature of things. In spite of this, human beings countermand and transform these forces by dint of their imagination and will so that, in every society, it is possible to outline a domain of action and understanding in which people expect to be able to grasp, manipulate and master their own fate.

From this perspective, we might conclude that it is not necessarily certainty about the nature of the supernatural that people need, but to know the boundary between the domains that they can control and the domains where they have to surrender control. This suggests that the historical-critical way of reading the Bible, while not offering the type of ‘facts’ that people expect, does offer a clear delineation of these domains. The interpretative framework offered at the pastoral centre clearly distinguishes between what we know and can know, and what we do not know and cannot influence, explicitly leaving room for the latter.

Furthermore, we can see how the certainties sought within the SG can introduce new uncertainties: if there is ‘another side’ that actively participates in our life, if there is a blueprint for our lives that we need to follow, how can we read the signs? When is something the result of supernatural interference, and therefore outside our control, and when is something simply the result of normal ‘cause and effect’ relations in the world (Knibbe and Droogers, 2011; Knibbe and Versteeg, 2008)? How do we find out what the blueprint of our lives is? And although mediums have direct contact with ‘the other side’, how do we know that the message has not been ‘polluted’ by his or her own limited spiritual development?

Comparing the two contexts, we can see that in both cases, the ways in which people phrase their problems and the types of answer they look for are quite similar. In both cases, the existence of God, gods and spirits is debated. In this, a popularized notion of science plays an important role: people want to know ‘the facts’, ‘what really happened’. However, whereas the spiritual society sets about finding the answers to these questions, the pastoral centre teaches people to ask a different type of question and to expect different types of answer. Rather than asking whether God really exists, people are taught to ask how the gospels show people’s experience with their faith, including the uncertainty that is part of faith and what they themselves could learn from it in the way they related to God.

In both cases, the societal dominance and prestige of science is apparent, but the attitude towards it is very different. In the SG, the popular notion of science as a positivist project looking for ‘facts’ and certainty is adopted. However, in terms of epistemology, a whole new domain is added: the body, emotions and subjective feelings are also considered to be sites for ‘fact-finding’. In contrast, the pastoral centre teaches people to place religious questions and religious knowledge outside the domain of certainty and facts. It emphasizes that it is only through tradition, the accumulated experience of a people, that the supernatural (i.e. God) can be known.

In both cases, new ways of relating to religious knowledge and religious authority are developed. However, whereas, in the context of the SG, very little reference is made to the local context and traditions, and the questions addressed are quite individualized and practical, the context of the pastoral centre allows people to work on the ways they relate to the local context and the role of Catholicism and the Church in their personal and familial past (although there does seem to be a barrier against addressing current problems within Catholicism (Knibbe, 2013a: chapter 6)).

In the introduction it was posited that the link between societal changes and religious change could only be studied by taking into account the way people themselves interpret their situation and use religious or spiritual sources to conceptualize and act on these situations. In classical secularization theory, the decline of religion is interpreted as a direct result of societal change (Berger, 1967). In recent attempts to redefine the field, attempts have been made to see the persistence (or resurgence?) of religion in terms of a response to societal changes such as rationalization, individualization and globalization, ontological insecurity and the rise of a consumer society (e.g. Davie, 1994; Harskamp, 2000; Bruce, 2008; for a summary see Knibbe, 2013a: 9–12).

A furious critique of the tendency of social sciences to interpret religious change as a response to social change was formulated by Ruth Marshall (2009) in her book on the Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria. In a paragraph titled ‘If Jesus is the answer, what is the question?’ she launches an attack on the paradigm underlying the study of religion in African studies, which she summarizes as the ‘domestication of modernity’ paradigm (Marshall, 2009: chapter 1). According to her, it is a fallacy to interpret ‘religion’ primarily as a response to impersonal societal forces such as modernization. This type of reasoning ignores the cultural and historical understandings of the people concerned. Instead, she pleads for a focus on the terms in which ‘the question’ (to which, in the case she discusses, Jesus is the answer) is posed. In other words, one needs to understand how people perceive their problems and needs before one can understand how a particular religious innovation can be understood as a response to these problems and needs.

In both contexts, we can see that the expectations with which people approach religion and the supernatural are formed by their understanding of religion as providing certainties, which is how the Catholic Church presented itself prior to Vaticanum II, and by a popularized notion of science as a positivist project. These expectations were not the result of particular structural changes, but rather were part of the religious and cultural understandings people grew up with: both religion and science were presented to them as sources of certainty. However, the ways in which the two contexts discussed here dealt with these expectations is fundamentally different: in SG, new ways of creating certainties, integrating scientific knowledge, were explored, whereas the pastoral centre taught people to view religion as outside the realm of facts, certainties and science. Furthermore, although there was some overlap in the kinds of issues that prompted people to enter both contexts (e.g. personal life crisis, existential questions, questions of truth), they differed strongly in the conceptualizations and solutions they provided, building on quite different histories of thought and practice. The fact that these options existed side by side not three kilometres away from each other is a result of the decreasing dominance of the Catholic Church, allowing the SG to operate openly. However, the popularity of one religious context or the other cannot be explained by claiming that it is particularly successful in its response to the problems created by societal changes.

Conclusions

In this article, I have compared two religious contexts in the south of the Netherlands that seem to have opposite ways of dealing with uncertainty. Whereas in the spiritualist context, certainty is seen as an attainable goal, the context of liberal Catholicism provided by the pastoral centre excludes the possibility of religious certainty.

Both contexts can be seen as the outcome of particular historical processes. Both contexts, moreover, represent specific reactions to the ascendency and dominance of science in Dutch society. Both, however, have developed very different ontologies and epistemologies. Where in the spiritualist context everything is ultimately seen as a form of energy, whose frequencies can be measured, in the liberal Catholic context there is a tendency to avoid any kind of ontological statements and to emphasize an epistemology that proposes that we can gain religious knowledge only via history and tradition. Where spiritualists blur the boundaries between physics and metaphysics, liberal Catholics reinforce them.

The fact that these religious contexts exist side by side, not three kilometres away from each other, and are frequented by people from the same general background (Catholic, rooted in the village life of the south of the Netherlands) shows that the link between social change and social structures is always mediated by people’s understanding of their own situation. Although in both contexts one could argue that people acted on situations that sociologists would describe as outcomes of social change, the understandings they developed of these situations differed radically. Both contexts are concerned with delineating the boundary between the domain of things one can know and control, and the domain outside human knowledge and control. However, the contexts differ in the type of questions they teach people to ask, and the types of answers and knowledge they assume are possible. Furthermore, there is a distinct difference in the ways these contexts relate to local history and society (Knibbe, 2013a: chapter 7).

In other words, the problems that these religious contexts respond to are not the problems identified by sociologists; people do not formulate them in sociological terms. Rather, they are phrased or rephrased in culturally and religiously specific ways, which may or may not be related to larger societal changes and are informed by (transnational) religious institutions and networks.